Sins of the Father
by SerenLyall
Summary: Leia's first encounter with Anakin was nothing like the fairy tales say it should be. When a princess meets her long-lost father for the first time, you see, there are hugs and tears of joy, and promises of "I'll never leave you again," and "I love you." But this is no fairy tale, and forgiveness does not come so easily as the stories say.


**Disclaimer: **The Star Wars universe, the characters Anakin and Leia, and all other recognizable names and objects referenced herein belong to George Lucas, Fox, and their respective owners. No profit was made from the writing of this.

**Rating/Warnings:** Teen; Mild language, mention of torture, and an (ambiguous) mention of rape (though it can be interpreted otherwise.)

**Time frame:** Post-Return of the Jedi (two or three years, maybe?)

**Notes:** This is _not _EU-compliant. (Honestly, I am not at all pleased with how the EU handled Leia's relationship with Anakin. There was way, way too much baggage between them for there ever to have been an easy fix (and honestly...maybe too much for there to be a fix at all)).

At the moment, this is a stand-alone, though there is a possibility of a sequel (or, perhaps, even of a short series. I'm really not sure yet). The writing of further sequels will largely depend on what inspiration I find, as well as reader response to this - if there's enough reader interest for a sequel, there's a much higher likelihood that I'll be inspired to write more. (That wasn't an attempt at a bribe. Really.) We shall see.

Lastly, I hope you enjoy!

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><p><strong><em>Sins of the Father<em>  
><strong>

The first time she felt the soft nudge, Leia brushed it off with hardly a second thought. She had always been good at blocking out the strange tugs at her thoughts, and even better at ignoring the strange, prickling sensation of an invisible breath of air rippling across her skin. (She'd had to be—had been trained to be since she could talk, though at the time she hadn't known just what her father meant when he would tell her, _"Your thoughts are your own, Leia. No one can take them from you if you don't want them to—if you don't allow them to." _She hadn't known then that no one else had a steel and mortar wall built around their minds protecting their thoughts and emotions, guarding their very _selves._) Even now—even after the danger of (_her father_) Darth Vader discovering the truth of her identity, after the peril of the Emperor realizing that she was far more than a gifted orator and politician like her Father (Bail. Her Father was Bail Organa, and no blood or genetics would ever change that)—it was still as natural as breathing for her to casually deflect a wayward probe or fluctuation within the Force.

The second time she felt the cool, pointed nudge, Leia frowned, and took a moment from her reading to feel the taint of _personality _beneath the movement. It was a nebulous, ambiguous sort of sense, a little like trying to feel water, or taste air. It was one of the few Jedi skills Leia had cared to actually practice—now that she knew just what it was, Leia had decided it would be beneficial to have the ability to sense just who it was attempting to read her thoughts. (Though there were very few people who would dare try such a thing—who _could_try such a thing. Save, of course, for Luke. But his presence, in her thoughts and in her emotions, she had known and understood even before she had understood her own.)

Leia's gaze slid out of focus, the words on the datapad in her hands blurring as she turned her attention inward. She felt along the twisting tendrils of the Force as they eddied around her, seeking out the disturbance that had distracted her. She found it easily enough—a bright, shimmering point of liquid blue—and she gently poked at it. The bright spot shifted, twisted, and then began to bleed away, leaving only the natural flow of invisible energy in its wake.

Sighing, Leia returned her attention to the files she was reading. The will to learn she may have, but her chances to practice honing her skills were few and far between, leaving her still woefully inexperienced in moments (like this) where she actually needed her gift.

The third nudge—though this time it was more of a poke—took Leia by surprise. Her eyes snapped up from the datapad (as if she might actually be able to see the cause of her aggravation standing before her), and she scowled.

_Sand, golden and brilliant and _hot_, and the dazzling, blinding blue of a desert sun._

The sensation slammed into Leia like a wall of durasteel (_"Why can I never do this when I try?"_ she seethed, in the split second between recognition and understanding), and then it was as if the breath had been driven from her lungs with an invisible punch. In that instant, she knew, _knew _what (_who_) was behind the prodding.

He felt too much like Luke to be anyone else.

The force with which she smashed away the next nudge took even Leia by surprise.

_Go away,_ she thought fiercely, lips curling back in a pointless, silent snarl. _I don't want you here._

Another nudge, this time more focused, more insistent.

_I said no._

Poke.

_Kriffing hells, I said NO._

One final, almost painful (_almost_, she would tell Luke later, grudgingly, as if she had wished it _had _hurt) prod.

"What?!" The word exploded from her, climbing up from her pounding heart and tearing free of her anger.

A shimmering figure appeared very suddenly in the space before her desk, blond hair flopping untidily across his forehead and into his eyes, a smirk twisting up his lips.

"Hello, Leia." His voice was far, far softer than Leia had expected. And suddenly, she wasn't sure it was a smirk. (Maybe it was a smile. A gentle, happy sort of smile—the kind she had seen her father wear sometimes when he would look at her. With the savageness of a tempest, Leia locked that thought deep, deep down in a box of ice and iron, where even she could neither see nor feel it.)

"What do you want?" Leia asked from between gritted teeth, her voice only barely what could be considered civil. Like metal grating on metal.

"I wanted to…talk," Anakin said after a silent moment.

"You didn't have to be quite so rude about asking," Leia snapped.

Anakin quirked an eyebrow. "No? You've been ignoring every other method I've tried."

Leia's eyes narrowed, lips white and thin, her jaw clenched so tight she knew it should hurt (_would_ hurt, later, after the fury racing in her veins and blazing in her blood had sizzled away, leaving her feeling empty and hollow and cold).

"Has it crossed your mind that perhaps I do not _want _to talk to you?" Leia asked, all ice and blade and spitting venom.

"Nonetheless, we need to speak."

"There is nothing I have to say to you," Leia bit. "Now get out."

"Leia." His voice was low, carrying the faintest undertone of warning.

She turned and looked Anakin in the eyes, lifting her chin in challenge. She had not been cowed by him as Darth Vader, she would not allow him to win now as Anakin. "Fine. Then let's talk," she said coldly.

_So much anger, even in your voice._ Anakin's thought was sudden and unexpectedly clear, ringing in her thoughts as much as in her heart. Then, "Do you really hate me so much?" (_her father_) the once-Jedi asked quietly.

"Yes." The question was so easy to answer, it burned.

Silence.

Leia looked back up, to see Anakin still standing there. Even the smile was gone now, though, replaced instead with a haunting look of—of what? Sorrow? Pain? Remorse?

"Did you really expect me to forgive you so easily?" Leia asked. "You? After all that you've done?"

"It wasn't me," Anakin said, his tone matching hers—quiet, low, and filled with an undercurrent of swirling emotion.

And Leia laughed, abrasive and loud and full of crystal disbelief. "Not you?" she scoffed. "Then it wasn't you who ordered the droid into my cell? Wasn't you who invaded my thoughts, who tried to break my mind? Wasn't you who made me believe that I was burning; that I was being flayed alive, the skin peeled inch by inch from my bones as I screamed in agony? Wasn't you who made it so I will always remember lying bleeding and broken and empty on the cold floor, men laughing as they-" She choked on her words. Then chanced a glance up at (her _father_) Anakin. Somehow, the sick and horrified look on his face, filling his eyes with loathing and disgust and anger (_At himself_, Leia realized, _all at himself_) did not give her the same sense of satisfaction she had expected.

She truly snarled now, low and hateful. _Damn you to every hell_, she shrieked at him silently, pouring every ounce of anger and hatred and loathing (and fear and terror and horror and, hidden somewhere dark and treacherous in the very depths of her heart where she would never have to think about it, would never have to feel it: betrayal. Betrayal, by (_her_ father) the man who had sacrificed everything to save a son who had nearly killed him, but who had destroyed a daughter without a thought, without a question, without even a hesitation, for nothing more than a name.)

"Leia," Anakin began, voice breaking, as if he was on the verge of tears. "Leia, please, I didn't-"

"Didn't know?" Leia cut him off, voice rising shrill and piercing, full of anger and incense. "Of course you didn't _know_," she spat. "Because Bail Organa, _my father_," she stressed the words, pretended not to see the flicker of a flinch spasm across Anakin's face, as if he had been physically slapped, "protected me. Hid me. From _you_. And for good reason," she added with a scathing sneer. She took a deep, shuddering breath.

When Leia continued, her voice was suddenly calm, eerily so, as if every last trace of her anger (_her pain_) had been leeched from her words, leaving behind only cool, calm hatred in its wake. "Don't forget who it was that held me back," she told (her father) the man standing befor eher. "Don't forget who it was that forced me to watch as Alderaan-" (_My home, my beautiful, peaceful home_) "-was blown to a hundred million fragments of rock and dust." Her heart thudded painfully in her breast, filling her ears with the echoing fury of a pounding drum, leaving her trembling and cold and aching all at once.

Anakin's eyes fell to the ground beneath his feet. "I'm sorry," he whispered at last, so quietly that Leia nearly couldn't hear him over steady pulse of anger (of _agony_) beating in time with the drum of her heart. "I'm sorry, Leia," Anakin repeated, and his gaze flickered up to meet hers. "Please…"

"Please what?" Leia hisssed, some heat returning to her voice, eyes narrowed into slits (so she wouldn't show (_her father_) this man that she was seconds away from weeping). "Forgive you?" she asked, incredulous. "I can't do that."

"I suppose you're right," Anakin said quietly. "I don't…I don't blame you." And there was such anguish, such heartache in his voice that, for an instant, Leia almost (_almost_) hesitated. Almost drew back. Almost cared for the hurt that she was dealing him.

But doing so would be forgiving him (wouldn't it?)—would be accepting his apology, his sorrow. And she couldn't do that. Not now. Not today.

(_Today_ _does not mean never._)

Perhaps not ever.

She was silent.

"Leia?" She looked at him. (_Her father_.) He met her gaze squarely, and he did not shrink away from the anger (_or the pain_) he saw in her eyes. "Leia, I am sorry," he said softly. And his voice, little more than a whisper, broke. "I am so very, very sorry. I only hope…" Leia lifted her eyebrows, silently challenging him to finish his sentence, her breath still in her chest. "…I only hope that one day I can prove that to you. That I can show you that there is good in me—that I am no longer the monster that tortured you and hurt you in so many ways. I hope that one day, you can forgive me."

(_One day)_

"I doubt it."

Anakin bowed his head, quietly accepting her words. "I will leave you to your reading, then," he said. "Farewell, Leia. I lo-" He stopped himself, swallowing what he had been about to say, and sighed, closing his eyes. "I hope I will see you again," he said instead.

And then, just like that, the ghost of Anakin was gone, vanishing into the nothingness before Leia's desk, leaving the faint scent of sand and blue sky.

Leia, the datapad long forgotten on the table by her elbow, buried her face in her hands and finally let the tears spill over.

_~fin_

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><p><strong>End notes:<strong> Thoughts? Comments? Constructive criticism? Wanting more? I'd love to hear from you, even if it's simply an anonymous "I liked it." Most importantly though, I hope you enjoyed. ~Seren


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